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Wij
vertrouwen stemcomputers niet
I am
involved in the
Dutch campaign against
the use of electronic voting machines without paper
trails. The campaign has really taken off and gets lots of
media attention (also in
English and
German). The website provides a wealth of
information which is available in both Dutch and
English. Part of this
information might be translated and transferred to the
EFVE (see below) site at a later stage. For now, here are just
two short news items that you can read in English:
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27 August 2006 - Irish Sunday Times
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Irish e-voting fiasco leads to a Dutch campaign against
machines -
- Irish ministers regularly boast that the country is
a world leader in technology and it turns out it is, but
not in a way they would want to promote. Ireland’s
e-voting fiasco has given confidence to opponents of
computerised ballots throughout the world and led to a
new campaign in Holland, the country in which our dodgy
e-voting machines originated.
Nedap/Powervote, the Dutch maker of the
machines, is also the main supplier of e-voting
computers in Holland, where the system has been used for
several years. Until now there has been little Dutch
opposition to e-voting, but since the damning report on
the Irish system, computer experts there are starting to
voice concerns.
One of their arguments is that if Nedap’s
machines are not good enough for Ireland, then why is it
all right to use them in Holland? Despite its assurances
that e-voting is working properly, the Dutch campaigners
are demanding checks on the software and a printed
receipt for votes. Or they want a return to paper and
pencils.
The campaign has its own website — the catchy
wijvertrou wenstemcomputersniet.nl. Apparently it’s
Dutch for “We don’t trust voting computers”.
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Experts Say Dutch Voting
Machines Unreliable |
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| AMSTERDAM, 07/07/06 - A
group of experts have launched a campaign against the
voting machines used in elections in the Netherlands.
They say the computers are unreliable. On a website
(wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl), initiator Rop
Gonggrijp explains he wants to check up on elections
via voting computers. He is founder of XS4All, the
oldest Dutch Internet provider. Gongrijp is backed by
people including software writer Peter Knoppers of the
University of Delft, researcher Anne-Marie Oostveen of
the Rathenau Institute and encryption expert Barry
Wels.
In the Netherlands, voting with a pencil is only
occasionally still used. Computers are used almost
everywhere. This will not be different during the 22
November early general elections.
"Checkups on vote-counting are done by a handful of
technicians, test institutions and civil servants,"
Gonggrijp complains. He wants the source code of the
software used to be published. A copy should be made
of each vote to allow retrospective checking of the
outcome and to be able to carry out a random survey,
Knoppers added.
Nederlandsche Apparatenfabriek (Nedap), the company
that supplies around 90 percent of the voting machines
used in the Netherlands, said it would even consider
releasing the source code. "Anyone could then copy our
machines", a spokesman explained. Nedap also supplies
voting machines to foreign governments. |
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Europeans For
Verifiable Elections
I am also involved in
the EFVE campaign. EFVE, short for
Europeans For
Verifiable Elections, is a European organization that is
currently being formed.
EFVE wants elections to be
verifiable by some reasonable portion of the voting
public. This means that when push comes to shove people
can go to the polling station, monitor their own
elections, watch their votes be counted, and then go home
assured that the election was honest. The current trend in
many European countries is to introduce 'e-Voting' (voting
on machines in the polling station) and even i-Voting
(voting over the Internet). Many of the methods used place
a very high level of trust in a very limited number of
people. Often the software running in the machines is kept
secret, and there is no verification that the software
that was once inspected is even running in the machines
that the public votes on.
EFVE thinks this is bad, and
wants to offer a platform to people from all over Europe
that resist e-Voting and i-Voting in their own countries.
For the time being, EFVE is mostly concerned with bringing
together already active activists and existing movements,
as well as with documenting the state of e/i-Voting and
the resistence against it in various European countries.
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